Fuck Death

Fuck Death is Graydon’s Sheppard’s way of helping the Fuck Death Foundation spread its message and achieve its goal of the “elimination of death through the generation and distribution of funds to strategically selected causes and initiatives worldwide.”

Yeah, the animation is purposefully cruddy, but the writing and some of the ideas are pretty clever, all of which Graydon handled on his own. (My favorite bit is the Haley’s Comet to Game Boy transition.)

This post was originally a Quickie, but I’ve got a soft-spot in my heart for post-human (or transhuman, depending on your take) messages. I was introduced to the whole concept of living forever when I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines a while back. That flipped a few switches for me, and eventually led me to Aubrey de Grey and his bullet-proof defense of anti-aging research.

For those interested, here’s Aubrey de Grey at TED. Yes, he looks like a rejected member of ZZ Top, but he’s a pretty damn interesting guy.

Fuck Death Federation’s approach to the issue is refreshingly wry and, for lack of a better word, cool. Graydon’s animation style fits nicely with their “fuck this shit” tone.

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About the author

Justin Cone

Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer and F5. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog.
Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

if you could do anything you could imagine instantly (whether in fully immersive VR or not) how could you get bored??? think how many cool people live on this planet that you haven’t met yet…
also, population growth is negative in all places that have education, and nanotech will create a post-scarcity situation regarding resources and energy. bring it on!
so cheers to the quirky/cruddy-ness of this animation, it holds my attention well. however, conceptually, this piece is fails slightly because as you can see above, people really do need concrete reasons to want to live longer, and being able to watch haleys comet come back around isn’t going to cut it.

ps, justin i hope you’ve read Kurzweil’s latest book, The Singularity is Near. I dare anyone to read that and not have your mind blown…you’ll fail.

If you want to go philosophical on it without death there is no life. I prefer that message, which has been very popular these days. Everything needs an opposite to be unique.

I didn’t mind the crudeness of audio or video, but rather of concept. The concept itself makes no senseâ€”at least not to me. Maybe I need a little bit more background on it. I mean, yeah, it would be cool to be able to choose your death I suppose, but that’s not really as good as not knowing when it’s coming. It’s like horror films, the scariest part is always before you know what the monster is.